


Fire

by Ecliptic (SandandSeas)



Series: Untitled [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics), civil war - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Drabbles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 13:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14165592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandandSeas/pseuds/Ecliptic
Summary: There is a ghost of fractured memory. A boney shoulder beneath his palm, a sad smile and a funeral in the fall.





	Fire

**[“желание’’]**

  
He’s being pulled down by the dead weight of his target, drenched leather squelches against his chest. There is watery blood in his eyes.

He grips tighter.

The world is too loud when he surfaces. The sky is falling.

[ _To the end of the line.]_  

There is a ghost of fractured memory. A boney shoulder beneath his palm, a sad smile and a funeral in the fall.

Sand coats one side of his target’s face as he drags him onto shore. Bruises are already forming, growing under the skin. The image is stronger than the frail one whispering in his head.

[ **Kill him. It’s not too late.** ]

The plates in his arm constrict, electricity in the breakers and wires. The hilt of his knife registers in the sensors of his thumb. Metal, smooth, deep groves. Military-grade steel.

The target’s nostrils flare with an intake of breath. He has freckles. Bruises and freckles. A biological galaxy alive across the skin like a cosmic blush.

He turns and limps down the sandy bank. He leaves his target alive.  His programming spasms against the choice.

The mind shutters, everything falls to background noise. Blessed silence soon follows.

 **[Mission Failure.** ]

 

**[“ ржaвый”]**

 

The sink drips in a sequence, there is a beat in time, a pause in the spinning of the Earth, where water gathers at the faucet’s rim, grows heavy, and then succumbs. A resounding _tink_ as it shatters against the metal basin below.

Each one is a gunshot in the quiet.

He’s curled up on a mattress he found on the side of the road. Threadbare sheets he stole from a stranger’s clothesline are scratchy beneath the skin of his back. Anticipation beads wetly at his hairline.

He’s staring at the ceiling where plaster is browning from age.

In the moments between each drip his heart stutters, stops and restarts.

Months of silence, of auto-pilot survival, and it’s in a dingy apartment in the middle of Bucharest that James Buchannan Barnes is revived.

 

**[“Семнадцать”]**

 

Museum admission is technically free, so he drops the remaining seventeen dollars he has stuffed in the pockets of his jeans into the donation box. The middle-aged man attending the ticket booth gives a surprised smile.

He glances away from the smile and takes his ticket.

The museum is crowded for a Thursday morning. A group of color coordinated high school students mill around in the atrium, their voices blending into a blank wall of chatter. One of them bumps into him as she passes and she pats him on the shoulder in apology.

He watches her disappear around the corner with her giggling friends.

He moves on.

The exhibit showcases the biography of a past life that he has no recollection of. He came here looking for answers, or maybe just a place to start asking the right questions. But as he stands there staring at the words until they blur at the edges, all he finds is a detached emptiness.

Something hits his good arm, and his body is strung tight in the face of a possible threat. He turns on the attacker and instead is met with the wide eyes of the girl from earlier.

“Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She asks and he can’t stand the genuine concern in her voice. Her eyes trail over to the wall he’s standing in front of, and he watches her as she works out his secret.

“You…” She trails off, staring up at him in shock.

He looks back at the wall one last time and pulls his hat low over his eyes. Turns away from this perceptive child and mutters, “Me.”

 

**[“Рассвет”]**

 

The mission.

The car.

_Make it look like an accident._

He does.

Decades later, the sun rises and all he can think is how Howard Stark looked so betrayed.

He remembers. He remembers everything.

 

**[“Печь”]**

 

The wipe is like being thrown into fire. It is like being boiled alive. It shoots deeper than skin, deeper than flesh, straight to the marrow of his bones and it burns away all that was lost and all that was gained.

The man on the bridge. A look of recognition. An echo in the void.

_[Wait. I know him.]_

Too late.

It’s all lost to the fire.

 

**[“ Девять”]**

 

Nine little girls, all in a line. They are too young for this world, for this work.

His orders are to break them.

So he does.

His programming overrides the nausea that roils deep in his gut. He slams them into the ground with as much strength as he would with a grown man. He screams into their faces. Makes threats too vile to be repeated that are punctuated with a blade digging into the bed of their throats. If they sob, he cuts them. Those that give up he breaks their fingers. Makes others dance until their feet bleed underneath the sight of a gun.

There is one with red hair standing at the farthest end. She doesn’t look at him but she trembles beneath his gaze.  He shoves her down and spits into her face. Punches her.

She’s seven.

She doesn’t speak, doesn’t cry out, doesn’t move. She only waits. Waits until he’s done.

When he stares down at her heaving, the metal of his hand wrapped around her throat, she doesn’t blink as she slowly touches the curve of his cheek and whispers so quietly:

“Why are you crying?”

“Escape,” he hisses as he breaks her clavicle with a sharp blow of his fist, “or die here.”

“My name is Natasha.” She says instead, the sound wheezing out of her. He punches her again.

“It’s okay.” She gurgles around a mouth filling with blood, she bit her tongue but still she says, “It’s okay.”

He chokes her until she falls unconscious. Stumbles back onto his heels and picks her up.

He ignores his handler calling out at him as he carries her down the hall into the rudimentary medical ward. He sets her on the nearest bed and sits in the chair beside it.

Four hours pass unmarked and when her eyes creak open, he stands swiftly. Her fingers catch his metal ones and she…

She smiles at him.

She smiles and its Godlike forgiveness.

 

**[“добросердечный “]**

 

The old women at the farmer’s market has aging bones and crow’s feet scratching at the corner of her eyes. Smoke curls from a dwindling cigarette that is held over a newspaper in her lap, a makeshift ashtray created out of the local politician’s smile. He watches as it dissipates in the cool morning air overhead.

The acid taste of cheap nicotine clings to his senses as he glances over the bins of produce between them.  This is his seventh visit at her stall since he arrived in Bucharest.

She tells him, on this particular morning, that she’s in love with him.

She says it so suddenly, in dusty English, that he jerks in surprise; his elbow knocking into a precariously stacked bin to his right.  He steadies it with one hand while his other one snatches an escaping tomato before it hits the ground. For a suspended second, he is frozen in a slouch with a tomato clutched in his fist and his mouth hanging open.

She stares expectantly at him and he feels a strange sort of panic set in, ““I’m—I don’t… you are— not that you aren’t… um.” He’s fumbling.

“Not _with_ you.” She elaborates in amusement, the rotation of her oak-grooved hand holding her cigarette is as dismissive as if she had rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue. She sucks in a lung-full before putting it out in the politician’s eye, a sadistic twist in her wrist drives it deeper into the paper.

He blinks at her and she mutters low and the sentiment of being called foolish is universally translated. The sticky hot feeling of embarrassment is unfamiliar and he sweats with it under his ball-cap.  

“I mean your looks. You look like my Costache.” She reaches down under her shawl and pulls a gold chain over her head. A faded locket creaks open over the selection of plums. A portrait is nestled within of a boy with black and white confidence in deep dimples and a military regulated uniform. He can see the similarities between this boy and the stranger he sees sometimes in the mirror.

"Spitting image really. Though…the eyes are sadder on you.” She squints at him, and he feels his spine straighten involuntarily under the scrutiny, “Also too thin. Come, I fatten you up. You’ll be better.”

She snatches up a bag from beneath the stand and begins to fill it. Plums, strawberries, cabbage and carrots. A single solitary tomato. She smacks his hand smartly when he offers money to her. The biometric sensors screech out in defense. He ignores the twitch in his fingers. The old woman doesn’t comment on how he tenses.

“I’m a selfish old woman.” She says, handing the bag to him, “You’ll come back and I like the look of you.”

Her eyes are absolutely shameless as she looks over him.  He can’t help but laugh.

She sits back, and taps out another cigarette, lights up and says, “You will come back.”

It isn’t a question. It isn’t even a command. It is a statement of absolute certainty.

He finds himself nodding.

The smoke-tinted grin she gives him is utterly beautiful.

 

**[“возвращение на родину”]**

 

When he remembers his mother, he breaks down in the stairwell leading up to his apartment.  

It was a dam breaking and his soul flooding.  Memories so precious that he couldn’t believe that he ever let them be taken.

Soft brown hair, tired eyes, a lullaby hummed in the dark. His little sister with missing teeth and grasping hands.  Steve sitting with charcoal stained palms and bruised knuckles, landscapes and portraits washing across parchment paper on knobby knees.

He sobs with it. The feeling is euphoric.  

Three…

 

Two…

 

 **[“Один”** ]

 

Bucky scratches at industrial restraints.  Pounds at the glorified cage trapping him in. Each syllable skins him. Each word is sandpaper.

Not again, he just got it all back.  

 

**[“грузовой вагон”]**

 

He sinks beneath the waves. The void welcomes him like an old friend.

 

**_[“Ready to comply.”]_ **

 

 


End file.
